BusinessWeek has a slideshow revealing new electronic devices that a consumer could use to enhance (or complicate) certain aspects of daily life. Among these is the very promising Sunlight Direct System, which I discussed back on September 5, 2006. Others, such as the Lawnbott ($2500), cost far more than the low-tech solution of hiring people to mow your lawn for the entire expected life of the device, ensuring that mass-market adoption is at least 4-5 years away.

All of this is a very strong and predictable manifestation of The Impact of Computing, which mandates that entirely new categories of consumer electronics appear at regular intervals, and that they subsequently become cheaper yet more powerful at a consistent rate each year. Let us observe each of these functional categories, and the rate of price declines/feature enhancements that they experience.

My thoughts on general immigration to the US are free-market oriented, and thus in opposition to isolationist conservatives as well as big union leftists. I believe that, within reason, immigration to the US should accomodate market forces.

However, the immigration situation today is nearly the opposite of this. 11 million have entered the US illegally, and are mostly at the bottom of the skill ladder, thus consuming far more taxpayer resources than they contribute. They are actually a disproportionaly high percentage of our prison population. At the same time, the pathway for highly skilled immigrants to smoothly and easily settle in the US is bureaucratic, painful, and often takes 7-12 years to complete. During this process, they are restricted from changing employers to seek better opportunities, are unable to secure permission for their spouses to work, and live with the psychological burden of being in limbo for an inhumane duration of time.

Making it easy for people at the bottom of the skill ladder to come here through violation of our laws, while making it extremely tortuous for people at the top of the skill ladder to come here legally, has got to be just about the biggest failure in US governmental policy today.

I am under no illusions that the mediocre intellects in the US government will be able to execute such a simple yet beneficial overhaul of our immigration paradigm, but I will propose a solution anyway.

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The US should allow free, easy, unlimited immigration of any individuals who have completed a Bachelor's degree in any field, from any country, from a demonstrably legitimate institution. The US decides which institutions meet the criteria of accreditation/legitimacy, and maintains the list, by country, on an easily accessible website. I would not even restrict it to people with only engineering degrees, or people who have only been educated in English. I believe that just about anyone with this level of education can quickly get a decent job in America, particularly since only those who are confident in their abilities will make the move to begin with.

Currently, about 30% of US adults above the age of 25 possess a Bachelor's degree, and it makes sense to bring in people who increase this percentage, rather than decrease it (as current unskilled illegals do). The unemployment rate for people with a Bachelor's degree is just 1.2%. Even a policy this open will not result in more than 750,000 people immigrating to the US per year. At an average of $60,000 a year, this adds an incremental $45 Billion to US GDP every year, which is a 0.3% increment to GDP growth every year.

At the same time, immigration of people with less education should be restricted to minimal quantities. There is no reason to dilute the educational attainment of US society, and thus dilute per-capita GDP. The bogus claim that "they do critical jobs that Americans will not do" is easily disproven by the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s, states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, North Carolina, etc. were fully functioning societies without the need for a vast underclass of unskilled illegals. US-born citizens did minimum wage jobs in those societies.

In short, we should bring in more above-average people and fewer below-average people. The simple policy outlined above will have vast and dramatic benefits to the US economy and American society. Economic growth and tax receipts will surge. Real estate prices will rise and construction will boom. MNC's will re-center more of their operations in the US. College-educated immigrants are the cause of almost no violent crime. Political and economic ties with India and China will strengthen, as most of the new immigrants will be from these two nations. There is virtually no downside amongst these multiple upsides, and I challenge anyone to come up with one (the notion of wage despression through such immigration is already debunked).

Yes another benefit is the destruction of 'political correctness' that accompanies the present debate. An education-weighted immigration policy will favor Indian, Chinese, South Korean, and Russian immigration, while locking out many Mexican and Central American immigrants. Different cultures attach differing importance to education, and while this is readily visible in the free market that is the US workforce, multiculturism has erected barriers to obstruct these market forces. It is time that the US became more pragmatic in this regard.

Many streams of accelerating technological change, from energy to The Impact of Computing, will find themselves intersecting in one of the largest consumer product industries of all. Over 70 million automobiles were produced worldwide in 2006, with rapid market penetration underway in India and China. Indisputably, cars greatly affect the lives of consumers, the economies of nations, and the market forces of technological change.

I thus present a speculative timeline of technological and economic events that will happen for automobiles. This has numerous points of intersection with the Future Timeline for Energy.

2007 :The Tesla Roadster emerges to not only bring Silicon Valley change agents together to sow the seeds of disruption in the automotive industry, but also to immediately transform the image of electrical vehicles from 'punishment cars' to status symbols of dramatic sex appeal. Even at the price of $92,000, demand outstrips supply by an impressive margin.

2009 : The Automotive X-Prize of $25 Million (or more) is successfully claimed by a car designed to meet the 100 mpg/mass-producable goal set by the X Prize Foundation. Numerous companies spring forth out of prototypes tested in the contest.

2011 : Two or more iPod ports, 10-inch flat-screen displays for back seat passengers, parking space detection technology, and embedded Wi-Fi adapters that wirelessly can transfer files into the vehicle's hard drive from up to 500 feet away are standard features for many new cars in the $40,000+ price tier.

2012 : Over 100 million new automobiles are produced in 2012, up from 70 million in 2006. All major auto manufacturers are racing to incorporate new nanomaterials that are lighter than aluminium yet stronger and more malleable than steel. The average weight of cars has dropped by about 5% from what it was for the equivalent style in 2007.

2013 : Tesla Motors releases a fully electric 4-door sedan that is available for under $40,000, which is only 33% more than the $30,000 that the typical fully-loaded gasoline-only V6 Accord or Camry sells for in 2013.

2014 : Self-driving cars are now available in the luxury tier (priced $100,000 or higher). A user simply enters in the destination, and the car charts out a path (similar to Google Maps) and proceeds on it, in compliance with traffic laws. However, a software malfunction results in a major traffic pile-up that garners national media attention for a week. Subsequently, self-driving technologies are shunned despite their superior statistical performance relative to human drivers.

2016 : An odd change has occurred in the economics of car depreciation. Between 1980 and 2007, annual car depreciation rates decreased due to higher quality materials and better engine design, reaching as little as 12-16% a year for the first 5 years of ownership. Technology pushed back the forces of depreciation.

However, by 2016, 40% of a car's initial purchase price is comprised of electronics (up from under 20% in 2007 and just 5% in 1985), which depreciate at a rate of 25-40% a year. The entire value of the car is pulled along by the 40% of it that undergoes rapid price declines, and thus total car depreciation is now occuring at a faster rate of up to 20% a year for the first 5 years. This is a natural progression of The Impact of Computing, and wealthier consumers are increasingly buying new cars as 'upgrades' to replace models with obsolete technologies after 5-7 years, much as they would upgrade a game console, rather than waiting until mechanical failure occurs in their current car. Consumers also conduct their own upgrades of certain easily-replaced components, much as they would upgrade the memory or hard drive of a PC. Technology has thus accelerated the forces of depreciation.

2018 : Among new cars sold, gasoline-only vehicles are now a minority. Millions of electricity-only vehicles are charged through solar panels on a daily basis, relieving those consumers of a fuel expenditure that was as high as $2000/year in 2007. Even when sunlight is obscured and the grid is used, some electrical vehicles cost as little as 1 cent/mile to operate.

2020 : New safety technologies that began to appear in mainstream cars around 2012, such as night vision, lane departure correction, and collision-avoiding cruise control, have replaced the existing fleet of older cars over the decade, and now US annual traffic fatalities have dropped to 25,000 in 2020 from 43,000 in 2005. Given the larger US population in 2020 (about 350 Million), this is a reduction in traffic deaths by half on a per-capita basis.

2024 : Self-driving cars have overcome the stigma of a decade prior, and are now widely used. But they still have not fully displaced manual driving, due to user preferences in this regard. Certain highways permit only self-driven cars, with common speed limits of 100 mph or more.

2025-30 : Electricity (indeed, clean electricity) now fuels nearly all passenger car miles driven in the US. There is no longer any significant fuel consumption cost associated with driving a car, although battery maintenance is a new aspect of car ownership. Many car bodies now include solar energy absorbant materials that charge a parked car during periods of sunlight. Leaving such cars out in the sun has supplanted the practice of parking in the shade or in covered parking.

Pervasive use of advanced nanomaterials has ensured that the average car weighs only 60% as much as a 2007 counterpart, but yet is over twice as resistant to dents.

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I believe that this timeline represents the the combination of median forecasts across all technological and economic trends that influence cars, and will be perceived as too optimistic or too pessimistic by an equal number of readers. Let's see how closely reality matches this timeline.